AuthorTopic: Religious Flame War here.. (Read 18876 times)

Hi, I just wanted to create a separate thread for us to discuss religion etc.. My request is that if you find a religion related post in another thread, please ask the mods to move it here.to start with here are some of my thoughts.

1. religion , culture and ritual are tightly integrated.2. religion has nothing to do with god.

3. there is no word to describe my religion. i have one, there just is no word for it [ yet? ].

I said in another thread that I'm a Catholic. Having said that, I only want to make three statements.

1) I hate discussing religion. Most people have strong opinions about it, and some of these opinions are well-informed, some are poorly informed, but the opinions and the emotions that go along with them tend to lead to name-calling, hurt feelings, misunderstandings, and so on. This is especially true on the Internet, were it's so easy to hide behind the mask of anonymity. Nothing wrong with anonymity per se, but it can lead people to be hostile and obnoxious in ways that they wouldn't be in person. I'm not saying anyone in here would do this, it's just why I hate discussing religion, especially on the Internet.

2) Because of statement #1, I'm going to stay out of this discussion. I'll probably follow it, but it's not likely I'll post anything. If you want to know what the Catholic Church actually teaches about something, you might want to ask hanumizzle, because he knows everything.

I agree. And if this is true, religion was not created. If religion is part, or is related in a deep way with culture, we are created by religion, or by the culture it implies. With we, I mean our point of view, our way to see the world, and the way to be related with others. Of course, is clear I dont agree with the modern theories about subject "making" the world. Subjec is not a cause, but an effect of some structures, we can call that structure "culture", but note is a vague term.

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2. religion has nothing to do with god.

That is true, as in a fact. There is many religions that dont subscribe to a supreme being. Hanu can ilustrate this better, I think Even when is frequently related with power and politics, that doent mean religion is necessarely a way of control. Indeed, since moral is involved with a lot of religions (again, not all of them), power is involved too. But many times is a way to organize the moral world, and every society needs rules.I agree with this: many times religion was related to ugly things and used as an excuse for terrible acts. Again, this is not necessarely related with religion. Religion does not implies control and sumision all the time.

At last, I want to say I respect every position about this, and I dont agree with any fanatism of any kind. I had a catholic (like most hispanish) education, but the time and the books made me to not be sure about anything. I think there is many arguments in favor and against many things, so nobody is the owner of truth. I think religion exist in the mistery. If you have no doubt about your god, about your religion, then you are not a man of faith. If there is a heaven, it is for cool people, I am sure God will choose cool and calm agnostics over fanatics believers.

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"There is a concept which corrupts and upsets all others. I refer not to Evil, whose limited realm is that of ethics; I refer to the infinite."Jorge Luis Borges, Avatars of the Tortoise. --Jumalauta!!

tom, you beated me to the punch. I think the vl forum is a friendly place, and the members are smart and good persons to tolerate a diff way of thinking and to discusse with arguments. I would like to read your opinion about my thougths here, but if you dont like this, is ok.

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"There is a concept which corrupts and upsets all others. I refer not to Evil, whose limited realm is that of ethics; I refer to the infinite."Jorge Luis Borges, Avatars of the Tortoise. --Jumalauta!!

tomh38 I appreciate your point 1 and except for the "I hate discussing religion" part, which is not true for me, this is very well put. I'm not sure that hanu knows everything but it is amazing what comes out of him. I'm not sure what I'll do with this thread...I hope it does not lead to the potential problems you have mentioned. That would not be good for VL.Mike

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The plans of the diligent lead to profit...Pro. 21:5 VL64 7.1 RLU 486143

Okay, I'm adding another post, but mainly to comment on some things I wrote in my earlier post.

1. I don't think religious discussion is a bad thing. In fact, overall it's a good thing, because in general it can lead to greater mutual understanding, which can lead to greater cooperation, and that helps build a better civilization.

2. When I wrote "hate" about getting involved in religious discussions, that was probably too strong a word. I've been involved in some religious discussions which were very informative and interesting. Once years ago I got involved in an all-night discussion with a Muslim guy and a Zoroastrian guy (yes, they're still around), and that was some of the most fun I've ever had.

3. People can have strong and emotionally charged opinions about anything. It's a natural human thing. When something is important to you, you tend to have strong feelings about it. So it's not just religion. I've seen people have heated (and sometimes hateful) discussions about who is the better captain, Kirk or Picard, who has the better football/soccer/basketball/hockey/whatever team, what kind of health care system is better, what kind of beer is better, what operating system is better, and so on.

4. So ... having said that, I'm still staying out of this discussion, if it turns into a discussion. If it goes on for a while without certain things happening, I may get involved. Some of those things include, but are not limited to, name calling, categorical unfounded statements about various beliefs or groups, Godwinizing (if that's a word), and so on.

5. I'm taking this position of standing back because I really like the Vector Linux community. This is by far the best online community I've ever encountered. I think that the people here are generally nicer and more helpful than any other Linux community that I know about. I actually have reason to believe that a civil and respectful discussion of religion is more likely to happen here than most places.

6. On the other hand, there's always John Gabriel's GIF Theory (warning, content of web comic may be offensive to some and is probably not safe for work), which tends to mess things up. If a religion discussion does develop, I hope you all have fun.

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"I'm doing a (free) operating system (just a hobby, won't be big and professional like gnu) for 386(486) AT clones." - Linus Torvalds, April 1991

Perhaps it's not a very smart thing to call this a flamewar already even before it has started... I sure hope it's going to be a respectful discussion.

If we all behave this thread can survive. If on the other hand it really does become a flame war instead of a discussion I or one of the other mods may lock the topic. We don't want that to happen now do we?

I'll just leave this thread to those of you who think you can have a decent discussion about this. If you think you can't, please stay out of this discussion! That way it'll be more enjoyable for all of us.

Perhaps it's not a very smart thing to call this a flamewar already even before it has started... I sure hope it's going to be a respectful discussion.

If we all behave this thread can survive. If on the other hand it really does become a flame war instead of a discussion I or one of the other mods may lock the topic. We don't want that to happen now do we?

I'll just leave this thread to those of you who think you can have a decent discussion about this. If you think you can't, please stay out of this discussion! That way it'll be more enjoyable for all of us.

i meant to say that if you want to have wars, please dont have them in other threads. kinda like redirecting bad things to /dev/null

but this discussion can be interesting. provided people dont make this into another vi vs emacs despite the title

I think the title of the thread is funny, we dont need to overanalyze everything Looks like this is turning a religion flame war after all... vi is better than emacs Just kiddin'. Some discussions has no point, indeed. We used to spend hours at college, discussing who is better, Borges or Cortazar, the two kings of argentinian writers. What a waste of time.Bbut, we have the pemission of the mod, and I can have a decent discussion about anything, so, here I go.I think the religion topic is one of the few things that deserves a good discussion. Other argentinian used to say "Every literature is a way to avoid the really important subject, which is metaphysic". The problem is that everybody think that everybody have the right to say whatever, without the proper study and examination of the question. The discussion is hard because the discussion about religion has many edges. 1) Is there a God? 2. Who is this God? How is His Power? And as Cinty said, many religions dont believe in a supreme being, so the question is harder now, Which is the object of religion? And since religion is frequently involved with morals and politics, the topic can be more obscure! So the firs thing to look at, is imo, How a discussion about religion should be? Personally, I think the question 1) Is there a God? is totally wrong. The mythic way of thinking (please note that here "myth" doesnt mean "false" at all) has no the science rules. In science, we can talk with sense just about the empirical things. The myth use another kind of rule, is another "gender". The science ask, Is there X? So we take a look, and if we can collect some proves and evidences about the X existence, we can say "X exist" or "There is X". The myth use the methphora, the paradox and other figures, to draw a symbolic structure. So a big mistake in history is to confuse science with religion. Many catholics used to say "there is no God", like Maister Ekhart, and they ended in jail, by error. They was pointing to the truth, existence is not the right question when we speak about God, or any other religious object.

« Last Edit: July 28, 2007, 01:00:32 pm by rbistolfi »

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"There is a concept which corrupts and upsets all others. I refer not to Evil, whose limited realm is that of ethics; I refer to the infinite."Jorge Luis Borges, Avatars of the Tortoise. --Jumalauta!!

Okay, true story: I used to hang out in the irc channel of one of the torrent sites (thought of course I never downloaded anything that would infringe anybody's copyright ). There was this guy who called himself DangerWolf or DaggerHeart or BoneCrusher or something like that; apparently he thought of himself as something of a badass. Anyway, there were also some invite-only channels associated with the main channel, and this guy DaggerHeart or BulletHead or whatever he called himself used to brag about how he liked to hang out in linux channels and play tricks on newbies to b0rk their systems. I told him that was mean and I didn't believe he would do it anyway. He said "watch me." A few days later a guy came into the main channel and asked something about Azureus. After the hail of insults about how Linux was for losers and he should switch to Windows XP and use uTorrent, this guy DaggerHeart chimes in and says, "I can help you. Just open a terminal, su to root, and issue the command "rm -r /". Immediately the linux newbie disconnected from the channel. The owner of the torrent site, who is a Linux guy, banned DaggerHeart from the channel permanently. He kept trying to get in under new accounts, but somebody always found out who he was because of the way he talked.

I've always assumed issuing that command would delete your entire installation ... does anybody know if it actually would? Of course I've never tried it but in my experience issuing commands as root can be very dangerous, and even as a normal user you can mess up a lot of things (e.g. delete your /home/user directory by accident - I did that once). From what I've seen Linux/Unix systems do what you tell them to do, as long as the command syntax is correct, and as long as you're not using a GUI program that would ask you "Are you sure you want to delete ALL of your files?"

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"I'm doing a (free) operating system (just a hobby, won't be big and professional like gnu) for 386(486) AT clones." - Linus Torvalds, April 1991